Our Mission

​The NEPA Trans Health Conference was conceived in 2012 as an educational forum for Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) area health care professionals, their staffs, educators, and the general public to learn from the transgender community and from those who treat and support them about the necessary care, respect, and understanding of people who are transgender.

Ms. Kira Kinsman, Conference Panelist, on what being a transgender person means to her ...

​​For many if not most people, it can be hard to understand what transgender is. It took me almost 50 years to see and be convinced that its a real human condition, and I was living it that whole time. Talk about the power of denial. Its as real as the color of a person’s eyes or the length of their fingers and toes; it’s innate. Being trans is a part of me that though invisible, is straight-up a function of the shape of my brain structures. Its estimated that one out of 250 people is gender-variant in some way. Gender identity is not a fad, a trend, or a fetish; unaddressed, it can and does kill you, because the psychic pain of living with a brain that’s not aligned with your body eventually leads to despair. Transition is the only known treatment.

To say that a trans person is “born in the wrong body” is language that speaks to being trans as a kind of a defect. It’s not a defect. No more so than a genetic predisposition to diabetes or breast cancer, or albino hair, or a brain that works powerfully for left-sided thinking but not so much for right-sided thinking. Every asset is a double-edged sword - it’ll give you strength here, but a vulnerability there. We are none of us perfect, but we are all of us ordinarily differenced. In fact, to be imperfect and vulnerable is to be eminently human.

Being trans is also not a psychiatric disorder, as was once thought. To see it in those terms is not to be fully informed. I can tell you that it presented to me as no disorder that I’ve ever seen or known of; it never impeded me from my goals, never impaired the performance of my mind to perform complex tasks, to socialize ‘normally,’ nor did it create a clinical depression in and of itself. Gender Dysphoria, as the APA terms the condition now, is a persistent sense of misalignment, but it doesn’t necessarily always lead to a dysfunctional debilitation.

I led a very happy life, my married years raising children were glorious and thriving, but the sense of incompleteness was ever-present, and eventually, unaddressed, it will begin to cause you to adopt unhealthy coping mechanisms - hiding, shaming, guilt, a guardedness, a resentment, and maybe a defensiveness that leads to imbalance. Gender dysphoria will grind you down, but the solution is rather simple: align yourself to your innate gender identity. If only our society could see this as a real, non-threatening, and not-so-very-uncommon way that some humans are made.

What causes it? We don’t know yet, but probably a difference in the in-utero androgen bath. A mother may catch a cold or other virus, experience a trauma, like a car accident or a fall. Something that seems innocuous but is enough to change the gestational hormonal process. It’s thought that the brain evolves in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy, while the primary sex organs develop in the 1st trimester. There’s some evidence that it’s genetic too - identical twins are occasionally trans. There are people with XX chromosomes, XY, XXY, XXYY, and you’d not always know for sure by looking at them if they’re trans, intersex, or cisgender. Therein lie the cues.

I don’t ask for sympathy - I don’t feel that I need it. I ask for simple acceptance that I am who I say I am, that people accept and respect me for who I am without a judgement they wouldn’t want themselves. I’m principally an architect, a parent, an employer, a taxpayer, and yes also transgender. My difference is invisible, and not well understood even by science - yet. But we’re understanding it better with brain imaging technologies, and it looks like it’s not one ‘switch’ that can be ‘fixed,’ but rather a whole patterned difference of several brain structures, in both the gray and the white matter.

Meanwhile, I’m doing the best I can with the cards I was dealt, as we all are, to visibly support the idea of the value to society of diversity of all kinds, to a compassionate approach to each other’s differences, and to the vitality that comes from a world where we’re open to new ideas about what it means to be human. I think a lot of hope lies therein. We all need to understand this, because your grandchild could be born not able to do math, or amazing at it but autistic, or gay, or even one of the 1/250th who are in some way trans. We need to understand that a trans kid could be the world’s next great cellist, or athlete, or runway model, or electrical engineer whose work changes technology.

​We need to see the potential in all kinds of people. And because I had to transition or die, - and that’s no exaggeration I believe - I intend to show that being transgender is no handicap. I knew I wanted to be an architect when I was 9; I knew I was gender variant at 13. I will not give one up to realize another. All I ask is to be able do what I do, and to be given the same respect I’d give anyone else. It’s really that simple. Barring an interest in having a deeper understanding, that’s all anyone needs to know. Respect; give it, get it, be and let be, do it with love and a sense of humor, and have some fun along the way. And the world will be better for it.​